When a bank turns an owner down, the reflex is to blame the bank. Karen Appelgren has sat on the other side of that desk, and her read is different. The no is usually the business telling on itself.

Karen is Associate Region III Director and Senior Business Consultant at the Idaho Small Business Development Center. Before that she was a business banker who grew and managed a commercial portfolio of Idaho companies with revenues up to twenty million in annual sales. She knows what a business looks like from the outside, from the seat that decides whether it gets financed.

We get into why the numbers that keep your taxes low can cost you the loan, how to tell a relationship banker from a transactional one, and the question that separates the owner who is ready from the owner who is hoping. She also names the part nobody ...